“Oh, little paper pine trees,” responds the student (who is also “taking” Education),—“and wigwams and canoes, and a real piece of glass for a pond.”
All this comes to my mind, too,—with addenda. The addenda, however, come to my mind first: Spilling Sand, Sweeping up Sand, Trailing your fingers in Sand as you march past, and, if you are very newly five years old, Throwing Sand. This is not because I am soured on the sand-table. I have merely learned that there is more to one than you would suspect from the outside of one, looking in. Sand-tables may mean pine trees, and they may mean pandemonium.
Throw several such freighted words into a mixed group, and the reactions are passionately interesting. If you say, “Muscular movement,” “Interest and Attention,” “Socialized Classes,” or “Projects,” you can sift out the school-teachers by their smile.
In fact, there is a very large group of noun substantives which mark, for an Elementary teacher, at least, the seasons of the year. Usually she has a top drawer full of these. Many a teacher longs for the horse-chestnut-on-a-string season to appear, if only to finish up the season of the maple-key;—that large pale-green maple-key, which, by clever splitting of the central seed, may be made to stay on one's nose. My young friend Junior O'Brien once read to me “The Three Billy Goats Gruff,” with a maple-key over each ear, one on his freckled nose, and two on his apple cheeks. I gave over my reading-lesson period to researches as to how his hard little cheeks could yield enough slack to accommodate a key; and before I was ready to ask Junior to remove his decorations, the force of gravity intervened.
The maple-key, I suppose, suggests eye-glasses. Certainly a bit of wire, twisted into spectacles, follows keys. These may be very ornate in the upper grades, more nearly approaching the lorgnette, or even the opera-glass. It is a fascinating thing to see what a wire hairpin correctly treated will do to a young face. It lightens my day's load, this vision of grave childish eyes through the twisted rims, and that magnificent effort of will, contrary to nature, to obtain perfect immobility of the nose.
In company with the gross of wire spectacles in my drawer are numerous “snapping-bugs.” These may be bought for one cent each, in the snapping-bug season, of the ice-cream man. They are double bugs of tin, which, if pinched in the proper spot, will yield a sharp click reminiscent of the old-fashioned stereopticon lecture. Snapping-bugs may go far in “socializing” a First Grade, and in making friends with a newcomer at recess, but when they snap in school they give me an uneasy sense that my audience is in haste to have the picture changed. So I have six snapping-bugs.
I have five tumble-bugs. These are vivid green or purple gelatin capsules about an inch long, each housing a lead ball. Place the bug on an inclined plane, and it will promptly turn right side up, or the other side up, as long as the plane continues to incline. Since tumble-bugs are practically noiseless, their life is somewhat longer than that of their snapping cousins.
I have one sling-shot. It might be argued that First Graders are too young for sling-shots. So they are. They all too often receive their own charge full in the eye. They much prefer their comfortable acorn pipes. These are pandemic in October, as are also balloons.
I once perceived Dominick, in the height of the balloon season, with a frankfurter balloon, a shape then new. The active part was at just that moment inert—a dried and crumpled wisp of rubber. But its tube was unmistakably going to be blown. Dominick will never know how much his teacher wished to see his balloon, properly inflated, swaying and glowing as only a green sausage balloon can glow. I was deterred by a misgiving as to whether this type of balloon collapsed quietly after its magnificent spectacle, or whether it was of that variety which emits a peculiar penetrating whistle as it shrinks—an unmistakable sound, due to be placed accurately in her list of sounds by my teacher-friend next door, who does not approve of balloons in academic session. Dominick, however, wished more than I did to see his lighter-than-air craft in all its glory. I finally deposited it among the false noses and horse-chestnuts in my drawer.
I used to wonder why a teacher wanted marbles and walnuts, and pencil-sharpeners shaped like a rabbit. She doesn't. She simply does not want to hear them dropping, dropping, ever dropping, like the pennies in Sabbath School. There is something thrilling to anybody about a real agate. If it is about, you have to look at it. It is so perfectly round. Anything perfectly round, or perfectly cylindrical, likes, as we learn in Kindergarten, to roll. It likes, upon occasion, to “rest”; but it does not like this nearly as well. It is not fair to a child to let him spend his time playing with an agate in school. Neither is it fair to him to destroy the beauty of an agate for him—the charm of its shape, or the marvel of its construction. A teacher should strike a medium so delicately and absolutely medium that the angels themselves pause lest they jar the weights.